Karen Kenobi
Balance in All Things
Karen felt the rush of air as the temple doors swung open, and smiled. It was so simple to control things here. She didn't even have to try moving her broken arm, all she really needed to do was to think about the door opening. And it did.
Of course, perhaps - she thought - she could be dreaming, or dead. This all could just be a big fantasy.
She was quite hungry and decided that pain, dripping clothing, burnt smelly hair, aching, and hunger weren't things that ghosts dealt with. She couldn't be dead.
Her feet slapped on the marble floor, an ungraceful sound to welcome her. But there were other sounds. A rush of water, somewhere near by. The calls of birds, above - the ceiling of this building had opened up in parts. Or...
She gazed up, neck burning in pain, and saw that there were diagonals cut out of the ceiling in a decoration which read in the old text: "Haven". The angular text was on almost everything - it half looked like graffiti, collected on walls and doorways as it was.
But this wasn't the same text as that on the big doors. She wanted to find more of that.
Taking a step or two, Karen remembered that what she wanted was to lay down and rest, heal up, and try finding something in her smushed pack to eat that wasn't disgusting with the water she'd been slogging through.
It wasn't long before those things on her list were completed. Though they were made of stone, the architects of this room had designed places for the weary or worshipful to sit. Dust and a bit of decay met her hand as she swept down onto one long platform. She didn't care.
Though her body was broken and her own power source almost completely exhausted, though she hadn't spoken to anyone in more than two years, though Karen was singularly aware of her lonlieness... Karen felt this was exactly the best place in the whole universe to be.
She slept for more than three days, after eating what meager rations hadn't been destroyed by her haphazard trip through the caverns. In that time, the Force pervading the place had come back to her.
"Surrounding us, binding life together," she muttered words that she had never heard her father say - they hadn't been said to her either. But she woke with them on her lips.
She sat up, careful of her wounds - and noticed that they weren't there. All but the most pronounced scars had healed - the one on her leg had remained, but oddly it wasn't the blaster scar. It was the bladed one.
"To remind me where I've been..." she whispered, her weak voice echoing in the big temple. It seemed that this place decided that she was best off forgetting or putting aside those battles. For now, she was home.
***
When Karen exhausted the possibilities of exploring the rooms of the temple, she set about actually taking stock of anything left intact. There were clear indications that parts of the temple had been both raided and ravaged by time. But for the most part, the things she wanted to look over had been left behind.
Gold and gems were always the first things to go, in terms of valuable trade items. So the Sith, or the pre-Sith, who had built their temple and stored their knowledge here did so without using such materials. While gold was a good conductor of electric energy, there were far better elements which took Force powers through them.
What could have been a simple quartz crystal was laced with a pale green ore - that ore stored Force memories built into it by its creator. When Karen picked that item up, her mind was filled with those memories.
More than twelve thousand years old - this temple was older than most of the known galaxy! Karen built a steady cache of information cubes and crystals such as that one, and finally got to sorting through them.
The young girl in her told her she could sell these things to almost anyone - for any reason. They were pretty, they had their uses in art, and if you were a Force user they could be of great intellectual value.
But she had no intention of selling them.
Sharing, yes, but not selling.
Then, around a routine of hunting and cooking, repairing her clothes and gathering what little precious and valuable items might be sellable, Karen learned the ways of a people that were long ago dust.
***
She was no longer a very young woman. But neither was Karen middle-aged or old. She had a look about her that said maturity - but not age.
Her starship had weathered the years on this distant planet well - she hadn't used it but had made sure that all the parts worked and it could get her to the nearest system in. If she needed to, she could sell it along with the other things she'd found and get a better one.
But now it was time to return to ... well, wherever. She had no idea what was going on in the galaxy since she'd left it. Though she pretended not to care, her memories of this world or that moon, this squad or that medic came back to her.
And her times in the Imperacy, as well. She had learned to fondly take those both with a liberal distance. They could do her no good if she didn't learn from them.
What Tamblar had said, that both sides would lose in the end, was very probably the only truth left from those days. The only similarity to the galaxy she knew. Rogues, pirates, smugglers and entertainers were forever.
Karen was none of those things - at least, not mostly. She'd never pirate any ship and plunder it for things that were intended for people already. She had been a rogue - killing even if accidentally and resorting to stealing items or food to get off-world once again. She was certainly not an entertainer, that much was sure. As far as smuggling, it was a vaguely noble profession as far as she could tell. Her contacts in the Empire or Alliance would both freely use smugglers as they knew routes that normal space ways didn't. And they had keys to doors that only certain people needed to open.
Karen wasn't sure what she could offer the galaxy now. She had to determine what if anything her skills would allow for.
She could fight: but she didn't much feel like it any longer. She was an exceptional diplomat... but she no longer knew any relevant information to trade or use to her advantage. Karen had knowledge - that left her with one clear method of re-inserting herself into things.
She would teach. That was it. She was mature enough that she'd be respected and taken seriously by teenagers - her primary targets for the information she carried. She wasn't so old that she would be seen as an outsider among those same young people. She'd been in battles - many of them - so she'd have the attention of roudy or unruly kids (and be able to deal with them if need be).
Yet there were still things that drew Karen away from the central portions of the galaxy. Stars glimmering in the night sky above this unnamed ancient world.
She stood for a long long while, next to her ship which had been packed, and wondered where she should go first, if not back home to the Alliance.
***
"It's not of very good quality." Said the man, his wild eyebrows catching the light and almost making Karen laugh. But she was struggling to maintain enough composure already - not to throttle him!
"Good sir, it does not look like much but this item is more than six thousand years old," Karen said, "it's dingy because it's old." She didn't add like you, you windbag!
Though he didn't look impressed, the man made an attempt to look it over more thoroughly. His eyes were old, but they were keen. Karen detected a tiny fraction of Force power around him, enough that she was drawn to his odd little nook among hundreds in this big open-air marketplace.
There were many distractions, but Karen watched him examining the box.
Finally, he asked, "what does it do, then? I can't have useless junk, even if it is 'six thousand years old'." He finished with a harrumph.
With a glimmer in her eye, harkening back to the way she'd have looked as a child causing mischief, Karen held the box in her hands and whispered, "this."
As she gently concentrated, she felt the light-box come to life. It was a very simple lantern, like her corded stone, but it was bigger and had other uses for one who could figure it out.
The inside of the burnished coppery-bronze colored metal box began to pulse with a faintly green glow. Then, shortly, it gave off a steady white-green light. Karen handed it to the man.
"It is a Force-sensitive lantern, my good man, that's what it's good for. I thought you might like it."
His eyes went wide, and he took in an unconsciously long breath. All his sales-man-like composure had been broken when she began to light the box. He could sense her ability, and felt the box's energy store now.
"I'll ... take it." He said, and then paused. "It's really that old? It's... one of those ... things, isn't it?"
It was as if he deleted the word Sith from his sentence without even thinking. No one mentioned the Sith out here - this was a closer area to their former haunts than the middle of the galaxy, and they might have been better known than even the Jedi.
That worked well for Karen, after that point. The man, whose name was Edmy, showed Karen in to his peculiar little nook in the cliff wall. After a moment of walking - light showing through the Force-cube - they reached what was either his home or a very cramped store.
Probably both, Karen thought, as she saw his curtained-off cot room and a little kitchen. The walls were entirely covered in ... junk. Every color and texture of item she could possibly imagine, and a lot she couldn't, were gathered in piles and stretched across tops of shelves. Bottles held exotic looking liquids and objects floated in some of them. Boxes full of more stuff, wires and electronic components, shards of metal and plastic, were everywhere. The floor was a maze of waist-high stuff.
At least Edmy didn't make any excuses for his clutter. "Now step around those. Don't fall on anything. No guarantees. If you break it, you pay for it."
It sounded like any speech he'd give a shopper - but then he added, "I'm looking for something you should see, now. You wait here. Don't take anything."
...How would you possibly know anything was missing? Karen thought but watched after him as he crept through the maze of his home.
The eerie thing about the place was that it was almost entirely dead silent. Even the small noise coming from the lighting fixtures seemed faint. The huge column of stone that the shop-home was nestled within housed hundreds of other such places - possibly connected through tunnels on the inside. Karen hadn't seen any ladders leading up to the higher balconies up the cliff face, so she had to assume that either they were for fliers or hovering craft, or people who knew their way around the place.
In the silence, then, Karen waited. She wanted to get some cash for this item but realized early on that the locals only dealt with barter anyway. Perhaps he had something left over from another starfaring traveller.
When Edmy came from his inner sanctum Karen knew that he'd found something that was far more valuable to her than a little lantern could ever be.
It was a box, but within were two items. One was a rolled up plas-fiber map similar to the one she'd used to make it out here in the first place. But the other was apparently a key of some sort.
It was laced with the greenish crystals that she'd come to know as Force-enhancers in the Temple. There were different varieties of stones and crystals, she'd even found some very rare red and black ones which she would keep on her person for emergencies. But the green ones were most useful - and thankfully most common.
"I never had use for this..." Edmy admitted, "but I know you can find out where this key leads to. The map ... I don't know. Never been much on maps. I only listen to stories about this system or that." He muttered as he walked a tiny circuit around a cluster of boxes.
"It's meant for a door locked by someone's Force powers." Karen said, looking at the key. It had an inscription on it ... in the ancient language which she had never been able to decode. She'd never found enough of it to learn.
"May I?" She asked, before taking the map out. Edmy nodded, encouraging her with the desperate look on his face. He clearly wanted to know what she'd find.
The map, she held up to what little light was available. It showed nothing more than a few cuts and scrapes - not like her Sith map. So she looked at it in a more traditional light, saw a strange marking around a series of planets which were quite far from there. Again, she could not decode the language.
But she thought about using her Force power on a whim. Something about the tingling key she could still feel sitting in the box made her take a deeper look at the map - but this time with her eyes open to things like auras or Force.
Flowing around the map were lines, words she couldn't read, and a picture of something fantastic.
"Edmy, can you see this?" Karen asked, finally. She turned the page to him, and it looked as though her eyes were glowing like a cat's.
Edmy shook his head, peering at the parchment. Karen took his hand, gently, and moved a little of her own power through him. With a start, and almost pulling away, Edmy realized that she was sharing her ability to see Force lines.
"That's a dragon!" He exclaimed.
"I thought it was," Karen said, smugly. "This map is as old as ... well, the place I got the lantern. I've been traveling a long time looking for things. This is ... Edmy, I can't just leave you with that little lantern box. Its not enough."
Karen made to produce some kind of item or compensation from her somewhat shabby robe, but Edmy wouldn't hear it.
"Now now, young lass, you don't have to worry about that. The lantern is more than enough for me. I'll be able to use it. It won't just be something pretty laying about like the rest of my things." He waved his old hand and almost knocked something down.
"But-"
"No! No buts - I'd never do this for anyone else. But what you just showed me was worth any hour of haggling I've ever done. All I ask," he said with a wink, "is that you show me whatever's there, when you've found it."
Karen slid into an easy, friendly pose, "you don't want to come along?"
He laughed loudly, continued to laugh the whole night through.
***
Edmy pursuaded some of the locals out of a number of little things for Karen, to help her on her way. He found her some new clothing - things which had been colorfully dyed and stitched together. They were now re-tailored for her muscular frame by a woman who obviously wanted to comment on Karen's odd collection of still-remaining scars.
She didn't, though. And Karen did not talk about them either. She wound up in a colorful rainbow-fire suit that looked quite remarkable under her new dark robe. The old clothing had to be all but thrown away - she'd been living in it and one or two other things for half a dozen years, and it showed.
Eventually, with her ship filled up with fuel and food, items she could more conventionally barter elsewhere, and the stock of her Sith items, Karen bid Edmy and the others who had helped her farewell.
"Are you going to that place now?" Edmy asked, hopeful. He was so boyish when his interests were piqued, and so gruff when he was dealing with some mundane duty.
"I've got to visit some old friends first, but," she held up the map and tipped it at him, "I promise you that I will go, soon, and I'll come back here with whatever I can. If it's a story, that's going to have to do."
"If it's a story I'll be sure to use the little record-box," Edmy reminded her, she'd found a new use for the lantern and taught him how to work it with what meager Force power he had. "But I think it'll be something... bigger."
Karen gave a bemused look at him, and at her crappy-ugly ship, "I hope it's not so big I can't carry it around..."